This Cleaning App Helped End the “You’re Not Doing as Much as Me” Conversations in My House

When you’re a parent, you often have to choose what can be clean: you or your house. And let’s be clear — a lot of the time I am choosing to shower over tackling the mysterious sticky food my infant threw on the floor two days ago. But, this can cause me a huge amount of distress. I work in home media. I crave a clean home. I get embarrassed when neighbors drop by, and panic that they’ll have to use the bathroom, which sometimes resembles a swamp. So, when my husband suggested a house cleaning app to help us organize the chaos, it was an immediate yes. 

This distress of my home not being as clean as I like can also tend to make me play the “who did more?” game with my husband, where no one wins and every single dish that’s scrubbed is done with a hint of side-eye. So after several discussions of “I did the dishes, the laundry, and took our oldest to dance” and “well, yeah, but I cleaned up the bathroom and scraped strawberries the baby threw several days ago on the hardwood floor,” my husband decided that we needed a reliable tracking system to both end these inane conversations and also help keep the house from looking like total chaos. Enter the Sweepy app. 

Up top, I am not here to promise you that Sweepy will magically give you time back or that your house will never be messy again, but I will tell you that it has helped my husband and me feel less overwhelmed at the end of each evening after we put the kids to bed. Also, if you are unbothered by a messier home in a busier time in your life — that’s also OK (and can you please give me the name of your therapist?). 

Sweepy is an app that gamifies household chores and divides up tasks among every household member. The app automatically gives each person on the app new chores to do each day, based on the preset tasks already loaded (and any new ones you add that are highly specific to your home). The beauty of this is that you don’t have to think about what tasks need to be done when. This is particularly helpful for things like cleaning the oven door, cleaning the microwave, or dusting the baseboards, which never even enter my brain space most of the time. 

It also tracks how many tasks each person does every day, week, month, and even year. This is really helpful for many reasons: It takes the emotions out of household chores (aka the “who did more?” game) and it also helps you realize, hey, we’re doing a lot of things. And if you have older children who are responsible for chores, you can add them to the Sweepy app and have their tasks be “approved” by the adults. 

This is the fun part. Setting up Sweepy is simple, and the app comes preset with household tasks for each room of the home. You can delete any tasks that are not applicable to your home (if you don’t have a basement, you obviously don’t need to clean it). 

You can also adjust the difficulty level of the task and the frequency of how often the task needs to be done. This led to a lot of really fascinating conversations with my husband. “It’s way more effort to clean the tub than to do the dishes. That’s worth three points.” The more high-point tasks you do, the higher your overall score; so as you can imagine, it’s important to agree on the difficulty as a collective. 

As you use the tool, you’ll also notice what tasks may be missing. Just today, I added that the stairs need to be swept every week, which was not something the app had preset. 

For a premium Sweepy account (which I highly recommend because you can’t share tasks with a household if you don’t go premium), it’s $19.99 for the year or $3.99 per month. 

Yes, but we are still humans with two small children. I wouldn’t say that our house is clutter-free all of the time, but it’s significantly less dirty. Before, when we had visitors coming, I would often panic-clean things that hadn’t been touched in months, like the refrigerator or the mattresses. This would take me hours and hours, and by the end of it I was resentful and stressed out. The app has also helped my husband see what needs to be done in the household to keep it truly clean — and there’s way less hostility around sharing tasks than there used to be. 

Sweepy reminds you of lesser thought-about tasks and helps us keep our home reasonably clean day-to-day. It encourages teamwork in the household and is also a pretty fun game. “Oh! I see you mopping. You’re trying to get more points than me, aren’t you?” is a phrase often used in our house. 

Get the app: Sweepy